Jackson said very slowly, very deliberately, “You need to give me something I can work with. You, Bellweather, and Haggar get together and concoct your story. Wiley conned us, and here’s how. Got it? Details, Walters, plenty of details, all believable. The three of you rehearse until you sound like a barbershop quartet. And it would certainly be nice if you produced a little paper or even a tape that backs you up. Fabricate it, if necessary. Understand?”
“All right. I got it.”
Jack could hear the sound of a chair being pushed back.
“You better,” Jackson said, a parting shot. “You’ll only get one chance.”
28
Mia slipped out of the office late that afternoon for what she told Nicky was a long-overdue dental appointment. A molar had been aching for a month; she couldn’t sleep and she’d put it off too long already.
Harvey Crintz was lurking nearby, about ten doors down the hallway, where he had an excellent view of the locked entrance to DCIS’s Pentagon office. He’d been there for hours, gulping coffee, chatting on his cell, watching and waiting.
Mia had stepped out a few times, but only to pick up food or hit the ladies’ room, because she returned within minutes.
Crintz had been called two days before by somebody in an outfit called TFAC, who claimed that Harvey had been referred by some mutual friends over at the Capitol Group. At first Harvey had turned white and gagged. Fearful that CG had ratted him out about his cash-for-inside-tips game, he claimed he had never heard of the Capitol Group, never heard of these friends. Deny, deny, deny. They must’ve confused his name for somebody else, he insisted and nearly hung up.
When the words “one hundred thousand dollars” somehow found their way into the conversation, Harvey’s memory improved and his listening turned razor-sharp. It was only a small favor, after all, the voice told him; nothing more serious or dangerous than what he’d done dozens of times in the past. As a member in good standing of the Inspector General’s office, it wouldn’t be at all unusual for Crintz to visit the DCIS office. And should he happen to, say, browse for a moment around Mia Jenson’s desk, and maybe, perhaps, by chance, find something interesting and relevant to her vendetta against CG, maybe he could find a way to smuggle it out.
Crintz lost a lot of sleep the previous two days as he considered and debated the offer. The pros and cons rattled around his brain. This was more than he’d ever been asked to do, but technically only slightly more. No, on second thought, a little inside information was one thing; this was burglary and the punishment was much more severe. It was also one hundred grand, though. A hundred thousand dollars! His to do whatever he wanted with, his to spend, his to waste however he wished. The Mercury Sable in his driveway was old and tired, the paint was peeling, and he could hear the transmission grinding to death; he’d love to replace it with something fancier, say a racing green Jaguar, and the decision was made. Mia was about to buy him a car.
Crintz waited five full minutes until it was clear that Mia’s absence was something more than a bathroom stop. He walked quickly to the door and pushed the buzzer. A voice came over the intercom and he knew it was an assistant. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Crintz with the IG’s office, here to see Andy Kasprisan,” he said into the speaker, identifying an agent he knew who worked in the office.
There was an irritating buzzing noise as the thick door unlocked and he quickly pushed it open. The assistant’s desk was directly in front of the door, and he made sure to give her a good long glance at the Pentagon badge attached to his shirtfront as he passed. “Thanks,” he told her.
“He’s way in the back,” she mumbled, then pushed her nose into some papers on her blotter.
“Oh,” he said, an afterthought. “Is Agent Jenson in?”
“Nope.” The assistant never even looked up. “Dental appointment. Just missed her.” She pointed a casual finger at the sign-in board on the wall. Crintz glanced at it and sighed with relief. Under ETR-estimated time of return-Mia had penciled in a time three hours away.
Crintz wandered around the maze of carrels for a few minutes until he located the one with Agent Jenson on the placard. The office was noisy, busy, and messy. Phones ringing, agents talking, all hotly engaged in the pursuit of waste, fraud, and abuse. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to him.
An agent with his nose buried in a memo was seated two carrels away from Jenson’s, and Crintz smiled at him, and said, “I’m with the IG’s office. Mia left something for me on her desk.”
“Suit yourself,” the guy said without looking up. He picked up his telephone and began making a call.
Crintz edged inside Mia’s carrel and settled quietly into her seat. The gray fabric walls blocked anyone from observing what he was doing. Unlike all the other carrels he’d seen in this congested dump, everything was neat and tidy, the papers arranged in orderly stacks. Even her phone slips were lined up like battleships awaiting inspection.
He pulled out a pen and his little green notebook, then began jotting notes. The phone slips first. The voice on the phone hadn’t been all that specific about what to look for, so Crintz figured he’d just snatch as much information as looked useful to justify his $100k. As fast as he could, he jotted the names and numbers in his pad. Then he moved to the stacks of files and papers on her desk, but nothing there looked all that interesting. She had a big caseload, and he was quickly lost in the stacks of testimonies, financial reports, depositions, etc.
He glanced at his watch. Seven minutes already, and he began to worry. At the rear of Mia’s carrel sat a large gray metal stand-up safe with four drawers-the same model found in nearly every carrel in a building that manufactured secrets. Regulations required the safe to be locked anytime the owner stepped away, but like nearly everybody except the most fanatic security loons, Mia was planning on returning and had left hers unlocked with the drawers slightly ajar.
Crintz got up and quietly slid open the top drawer. The files were neat and superbly organized, apparently like everything in Jenson’s life. They were alphabetized, too, though he found no Capitol Group files under C. He thought he knew why, smiled to himself, and pushed the drawer back the way he’d found it. He bent down to the bottom drawer where the W’s would be found, quietly eased it open, took one long peek, and struck gold.
There were about thirty thin files with titles beginning with W, then ten or fifteen thick green files labeled “Capitol Group,” but he didn’t know where to begin. It looked like at least a thousand pages. Far too much to read, much less memorize, and copying a pile of this size was out of the question.
And stealing all of it was definitely not an option, Crintz thought.
He got down on his creaky knees and began riffling through files as fast as he could, hoping he’d get lucky. Maybe he’d find some golden nugget that would warrant the hundred-thousand-dollar payoff. Jenson, he quickly realized, after scanning enough files, had been watching and tracking CG for months, if not far longer. She had the firm’s financial reports going back three years. As a private firm, CG wasn’t legally obligated to file with the SEC, but it did have to submit the material to the Pentagon procurement office every time it bid on a contract.
But Mia had so much more than that: the names and biographical data of all the key players; transcripts of all congressional hearings dealing with the polymer; a lot of background material on some company called Arvan Chemicals; and so on and so forth. From long experience in the Inspector General’s office he recognized what he was looking at; she was laboriously and studiously plotting a giant case.